Thanks for the presentation, it a great one !!! But it has left me confused on one point. I know Agile and I know scrum but Kanban is new to me. I dont understand when the presentation says Scrum team Kanban 1 and then says Kanban team 2 and kanban team 3 on slide no 10. Can some one please tell me wether scrum team are different than Kanban? Id yes whats the difference.

If Team 1 calls themselves a Kanban team and Team 2 calls themselves a Scrum team, the only thing we know for sure is that they have different names. Other than that, the teams can be very similar or very different. I suggest you read the “Kanban vs Scrum” article, it should clarify things. http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/Kanban-vs-Scrum.pdf

The slides you saw are mostly just pictures, with little or no explanation.

This really reminds me of a fast food restaurant. That’s a good thing. Deployment is king because in-progress or completed food that’s not deployed is going stale and the customers are going hungry. No point taking more orders or preparing more food if the orders aren’t being completed. The prime focus has to be deployment and staff get moved down-stream to relieve the blockage and balance the system.

I have also a demonstration of Kanban coming and these I was planning to show as well. I’ve worked with Scrum and Kanban now for a year and eventually starting to get the big picture 🙂 Your work has both helped and inspired me a lot and for that I salute you sir. Tack så mycket.

This is great, of course, AND this is how I have always coached people to do Scrum. Work on one story at a time (max two) and the whole team work on outstanding tasks for that story until the story is complete. I can’t imagine why anyone would do otherwise. It would result in a loss of focus and a task-switching overhead.

In a Scrum sprint, would you be OK with not having a sprint plan, and instead having the PO add stories to the sprint on a just-in-time basis? That particular aspect is otherwise what I consider to be non-Scrum. Scrum, as I’ve understood it, prescribes that the team should commit to a fixed number of stories for a sprint, and not allow the PO (or anyone else) to change this during the sprint.

Nice pictures to explain Kanban, thank you! If you want to show what happens to flow with various work in progress limits and the (usual reaction) effect of putting more people in one ‘step’, we build a small simulator: http://zilverline.github.com/flowmulator/public/index.html and a blog describing why we build it: blog.zilverline.com/2012/09/21/flowmulator-a-kanban-flow-simulator/

I believe you have to understand or find the answer on “why it should go back!”. Is it because of a customer requirement? is it because something blocks it? Strictly speaking if you have WIPs in place and you get a blocking card, it may create a huge…

First off, the cartoon is really meant to illustrate a high level interpretation of the Kanban objectives.

BOTTOM LINE
This cartoon is pretty typical of the early development effort of many teams. Though I see only minor problems, I think there is a great opportunity for deploying best practices.

PROBLEMS
1. The development team hadn’t agreed on development standards. As a result, someone broke the build.
2. Increasing the development Work-in-Process (WIP) limit from 2 t o3 (see last box)…
a. Hides problems or constraints in the process, in this case a broken build or deployment process. The Team (capital T) has the impression that work gets done since after all more stories are being developed, but no value is being delivered since that only happens when a story is deployed.
b. Adds little value early on at least because the Team (capital T) can’t even consume the first story or unit of work.
c. However, it is reasonable to increase the WIP limit once the Team (capital T) can demonstrate that it is able to consume the
3. Everyone rushing to offer help increases disruptions and puts additional pressure on the team when those involve know what needs to be done

BEST PRACTICES
1. Implement a Sprint 0 so that the Team (capital T) can iron out bugs in the end-to-end process.
2. Implement development standards to reduce the possibility of new checked in code breaking the build.
3. Implement ‘Continuous Integration’ to identify immediately when a unit of code breaks the build process.
4. Implement an automated ‘Smoke Testing’ or ‘Regression Testing’ process to make sure that the none of the existing functionality is broken in the latest build. After all, why deploy a new build that takes a step backward in quality and functionality delivered?
5. The Team (capital T), but usually the ScrumMaster in Agile, could have better communicated its problems and delays, in particular to the Product Owner (red figure) to better manage expectations

It seems the green team members on the deploy stage is waiting for something to deploy.
I assume they have other development/operations tasks while waiting for something to deploy?
And they are part of the team?